What you need to know
- Bartender.live will tell you what drinks you can make based on whatever you have at home.
I'm not a big cocktail drinker but if I was, I'd want to know what drinks I can make based on the meager collection of things I have in my pantry and bar. It seems that's something most apps don't offer, but one that does is bartender.live and, by all accounts, it's pretty sweet.
Developer David Gagne came up with bartender.live after struggling to come up with a drink based on his own pantry. And the app was born.
On Thanksgiving of 2017, I was standing in the pantry at my father-in-law's trying to think of a cocktail to make instead of (yet another) G&T. "Surely there's an app that will tell me what I can make with what I have here," I thought.
Turns out, there wasn't. Since then bartender.live has grown and grown and ut now has more than 1,000 recipes for drinks that you've probably never heard of. Which is kind of the point, really.
The process of using bartender.live is pretty simple. You tell the app what you have and it cross-references that with its collection of drinks. If you have everything needed to make one, you're good to go. If not, it's probably time to get yourself down to the store.
There's more here, too.
- Easily discover drinks you can make with the ingredients you have at home!
- Search and browse over a thousand cocktail recipes, with more added almost every day.
- Star your favorite drinks for quick access.
- Send recipes to friends or post to Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook.
- Learn the history of how a drink was created.
- Discover new cocktails based on what you have.
As we stumble our way into Christmas 2020 this strikes me as the kind of app we all need right now. You can bag it from the App Store for $2.99 (opens in new tab) now. And it recently gained iOS 14 widgets that put drink recipes on your Home screen, too!
